i was hit with a thought today. andy kept using the fact that since i’ve had crushes on one particular guy for years or way beyond a reasonable time (aka the guy is with someone, the guy is gay, the guy doesn’t know i even exist,…you fill in the blank) that i might not be over him completely, since we actually were involved. when andy wrote this in his e-mail, it literally crushed me. how could he use things that i told him in passing or to explain the workings of my silly heart when i was much younger, now, now that i’ve been actually dating real people and not living in the fantasy world of crushes. how dare he presume to know my heart better than i did?!
but lately, it’s starting to sink in a little, there’s a bit of truth to what he said, i guess that’s the bit that hurts to very core of me.
i may be much older now and more experienced in the department of sex and dating and even love, but i’m still that 12-year-old in love with my sister’s best friend, allan jenman. he was smart. he was cute (even back then, i fell head-over-heels for the sorta geeky type). i’m still that girl who hopes he will hold my hand and want to be my boyfriend forever happily ever after.
i’ve had a crush on a boy or two every year of my life from age 7 on. i wouldn’t say i was boy-crazy. it wasn’t like i wanted to be with every boy i saw– no, rather, the way my mind worked was that i’d find one boy in particular to adore and then my world would revolve around liking this one boy. i think when you have a dad like mine who was so over-protective and -bearing, you either say “fuck you, dad!” and do as you please like my older sister and face the consequences (my sister was disowned for 7 years) or you obey and find coping mechanisms to get through the regime known as childhood like me and face the consequences (i was a virgin until i was 26). you learn to play the part of the “good girl” and you bring home straight a’s to please your parents. you never ask to go to parties or to hang out with friends, you don’t ask for the latest things to wear, games to play, and you just quietly accept whatever is given to you, whether that meant hand-me down clothes that don’t really suit you or a good slap in the face for saying the wrong answer to a math problem. you learn to disappear.
one of those coping mechanisms for me was to develop a crush, a fantasy love with one boy in school. that way, you have this little giggle to look forward to do in your otherwise dreary life. believe me, these little giggles in my heart didn’t happen very frequently, but when they did, they would become treasures that i’d hide away in my hope chest forever. it could be the most simplest gesture of waving “hello” in the hallway at school, something that didn’t mean a thing to the offerer, but the whole wide world to the receiver, me.
for example, it probably didn’t mean a thing to steven mendoza back at the “packed lunch” table back in 5th grade to offer me a cookie, but my heart got a good giggle. he gave me another giggle two years later when i ran into him in jr. high school, and he actually remembered my name. the final giggle happened about 7 years after the second one, when my mom was in a shop he was working at, he turned to my mom and asked if she knew me. my mom, of course, was shocked and didn’t say anything. finally he explained to her that he had gone to school with me and that he recognized my mom because she reminded him of me. i’m sure there were plenty of everyday giggles i got from steven, but these are the ones that stuck with me all my life. all the boys whom i secretly crushed on assisted me in some shape or form to get through the drudgery of my existence of getting straight a’s, making sure my dad didn’t get mad at me or my sisters or my mom, and trying to find my voice.
but these crushes also stunted my growth. they sheltered me from the reality of rejection but ultimately from acceptance. all the while i had crushes and was living this imaginary life in my heart of eventually marrying my crush, having three wonderful children, and growing old together and since my crushes didn’t really like me back or didn’t miraculously walk over and ask me to the school dance or give me a secret valentine’s day card, at the end of the day, i felt unloved. i was let down everyday. each day, that hope would resurface, that anticipation, the secret wish that he would see me that day and fall in love instantaneously, only to be crushed in the end because he didn’t even say “hello,” or even worse, i’d find out that he asked so and so out instead of me.
fast forward to now, i actually dated and even fucked and tried very hard to develop real relationships beyond the crushing phase, but struggled miserably to figure out how this dating game worked. back when i was on the sidelines, i didn’t have to actually interact, put my actual heart out there to be loved or unloved, get bruised, or socked in the head trying to get that touchdown; i had nothing to really lose or win. in the real dating world, people can be very callous with your heart, nothing is predictable, nothing is safe, it’s not like watching NBA game where you sorta know who’s going to win, but rather, it’s the NCAA where an underdog team can completely screw up your chances to win the office pool. and sometimes you win, but often times, you lose.
so after playing this game for the last 7 years, mind you, not even playing very well, i’m sitting on the sidelines again with a bleeding heart, trying to figure out how the other players of the game figured it out, how did they score and get their names in the hall of fame, and when would i finally find a teammate on the same gameplan as me. my heart’s been crushed one too many times by imaginary loves and now real ones that it makes a girl start to wonder if the game is even worth playing anymore. maybe some people are born to be star athletes while others are born to just watch from the sidelines, write silly blogs about her observations on the modern mating rituals of city dwellers, and lament over her own crushed dreams of winning that ultimate game called love.
believe me, i wish i could tell you that i feel more inspired to get back in and play my hardest, but i’ve also learned that life isn’t a 30-minute afterschool special, things don’t always work out in the end. so until my team really needs me to hit that homerun, slam dunk, or kick that ball into the net to scooooooooooooooooooooooooooore, i’m sitting here on the sidelines, crushing from a safe distance the next guy who happens to steal my heart.
3 Comments
June 4, 2008 at 10:11 am
Your inquiry into your experience is so familiar.
Isn’t it curious to notice how experience and feelings replay over and over until we actually reach the point of wondering if that lover we imagine so perfectly, is even possible and worth the search.
Yet all the while the longing for that lover that began before we can remember keeps courting us.
How can it be so perfect and impossible at the same time?
July 1, 2008 at 12:28 pm
I think the short answer to how to “win” the game is that people find a way to accept each other for who they are. You need to have someone who is at the same point in their life as you are (wanting to find the right person and ready for committment) and has a similar desire for his future. Not an easy thing to do.
The mysterious thing is that even though I think you should look for someone who is as similar to you as possible (in terms of social background, education, values, etc.) we often end up with someone who is quite different than what we had originally envisioned ourselves. “You’re Not the One I was Looking For” (a song by Blue Oyster Cult from Mirrors) talks about this. Not their best song, but I can connect with the lyrics.
Another factor is living in an area where people aspire towards committment rather than a lifetime of “freedom”.
July 7, 2008 at 1:11 pm
I think you’re closer to a great piece of self-discovery here than you realize. I wonder if perhaps you aren’t as far removed from “grade 5 love” as you might think.
One of the challenges of finding love (and any sort of relationship really) as we get older is that we each bring so much history along with us. We become far more comfortable with ourselves than we should ever expect from another. And yet we want that special someone to recognize us instantly — our hopes, dreams and ambitions that amass over 30+ years of life. An overwhelming complexity.
In many ways you want your love to grow the way you always imagined it would since you were a little girl. The trouble of course is that you are no longer that little girl. You are so much more.
Perhaps the lesson here is in the tiniest of details in your story. Not the lessons of love gone bad or just gone. Not in the mistakes and missteps along the way. Perhaps the truth of this story begins in Organic Chemistry where you first learned that dreams, no matter how big, are sometimes just dreams.